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Onwards and outwards

After its fly-by of Pluto last July, the New Horizons spacecraft has got one final job before its fuel runs out. NASA has approved an extension of the mission to visit 2014 MU69, an ancient object just 30 kilometres across. The probe will head out into the Kuiper belt and is scheduled to reach MU69 on 1 January 2019.

Don’t take it lying down

The idea that women are more likely to conceive if they lie down to help sperm reach the egg is bogus. Women who rested for 15 minutes after insemination were no more likely to get pregnant than those who moved around. The work was presented at the annual meeting of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Endocrinology in Helsinki, Finland.

Cosmic weather map

In March, a software glitch caused the Japanese X-ray space telescope Hitomi to spin itself to pieces just six weeks after launch. But before the malfunction, the probe mapped one of the largest weather systems in the universe, the flowing plasma of a clump of galaxies known as the Perseus cluster (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature18627).

Greenpeace under fire

A third of all living Nobel laureates have signed a letter criticising Greenpeace’s stance on genetically modified crops. Greenpeace has “misrepresented the risks, benefits and impacts” of GM crops, they say, adding that “there has never been a single confirmed case of a negative health outcome for humans or animals from their consumption”.

Asleep, one ear open

King penguins sleeping on a beach react to different levels of threat, the Society for Experimental Biology meeting in Brighton, UK, has heard. When orca or skua calls were played, the penguins woke up and fled. Sounds of non-predators woke them but they did not flee.